What Killed Dunkard Creek?

Residents in Pennsylvania and West Virginia say fracking is to blame.

“Bluegill” by Nan Buery On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta…
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by: Adam Federman – Winter 2012

Not a Matter of Taste

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
By Barry Estabrook
Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011, 240 pages

The vast majority of winter tomatoes in the United States are grown in Florida, a region whose soil and climate are inhospitable to the cultivation of this popular fruit. That paradox alone illustrates the folly of a $5 billion industry that relies on deplorable labor practices, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and fragile economies of scale to produce perfectly round, perfectly red, and perfectly tasteless tomatoes. “Of all the…
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by: Adam Federman – Autumn 2011

The Most Dangerous Game

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
by John Vaillant
Knopf, 2010, 352 pages

In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, poverty, desperation, and lawlessness have led to one of the great environmental catastrophes of our time: the deforestation of the Russian taiga. A thriving market in illegally harvested timber has taken off along the Russia-China border. More than five billion pounds of largely unprocessed wood from Russia’s Primorskii Krai region, in the southeastern part of the country, enter China each year. Primorye…
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by: Adam Federman – Summer 2011

Pressure Mounts on Khimki Developers

Russian activists have held off construction of a major highway through an old growth forest outside of Moscow much longer than most would have imagined. What began as a seemingly provincial standoff between an embattled newspaper editor and journalist – Mikhail Beketov…
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by: Adam Federman – April 20, 2011

Can’t Find My Way Home

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall
by Colin Ellard
336 pages, Doubleday, 2009

In 1966, John W. Berry, a psychologist at Queen’s University, published a study comparing the perceptual abilities of Inuit, modern urban Scots, and the Temne, a West African agricultural society. Through a series of drawing and visual exercises he showed that the Inuit generally had superior spatial and visual skills. Their keen sense of physical space has been attributed to the necessity of hunting and traveling long distances over flat, snow-covered terrain…
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by: Adam Federman – Spring 2011

Use of Diesel Fuel in Fracking Violates Safe Drinking Water Act

The 2005 Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act famously exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. But it made one small exception: diesel fuel. The Policy Act states that the term “underground injection,” as it relates to the Safe Drinking Water Act,…
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by: Adam Federman – February 1, 2011

Khimki Forest Defenders Felled by Kremlin, but Struggle Will Continue

A decision to halt the construction of a highway that would cut through Moscow’s Khimki forest earlier this year has been overturned. Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov, announced last week that the development would go ahead as planned, adding that, “additional…
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by: Adam Federman – December 20, 2010

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